This is a good article. I recommend reading it in its entirety and then coming back here. I would quibble with a point or two, but I generally agree whole-heartedly with the analysis and prescription contained within. The gist of it below is very good and echoes a lot of what I write on here:
"In America, by contrast, the dominant common sense is essentially anti-solidaristic: It is the notion that one must look out for himself, for his own; and that others — especially alien or unfamiliar Others — are a natural threat to one’s individual achievement. These are the ideas that feel instinctively true to many Americans, that feel realistic and sensible. And thus, “wokeness,” as I have idiosyncratically defined it, is hostile to the basic logic of leftist organizing. Solidarity requires an invitation, a warm and friendly offer to collude in a risky proposition. It doesn’t work as a sanctimonious entreaty to identify with an existing set of self-evident values. As leftists, we must make this offer — of interdependence in exchange for shared liberation — again and again, in different places, to different people, in different ways and hope that it begins to make sense. That’s the whole game. Won’t you join me?"
While I and many others liked the article, not everyone did. In fact a lot of people hated it! With much vigor! Which is funny given both a) the purposefully apologetic tone of the article and b) the very concept of solidarity it argues for. This would not be notable except for the specific counter-argument proffered by most of the critics. Here is an incomplete sampling of these critiques for those of you that aren't constantly guzzling them in on Twitter like I am:
The throughline I get from these (and other) reactions is best summarized as this: The critique of "wokeness" in the article entertains and/or sounds vaguely like right-wing critiques of the same thing, so the critique itself must be reactionary. I think this is silly. I will expand on this assertion below, but it's important to note that the author anticipates this reaction and addresses it in the article:
"And so, the loudest critics of “wokeness” are usually either (a) reactionaries who would despise left-wing values regardless of the idiom in which we expressed them or (b) liberals who have made such a fetish of electoral margins and campaign messaging that they don’t recognize as legitimate those forms of political activity which are not reducible — or in every instance conducive — to the goal of Democratic electoral gains. Those of us who believe in a more egalitarian racial and economic order (and who doubt the Democratic Party is the only or best vehicle for achieving it) have no particular reason to trust either of these factions. Their critiques of our political strategies are impossible to disentangle from the incompatibility of our political visions.
That all being said, I want to suggest that the critique of “wokeness” may point to a real problem for socialists, feminists, and other radicals, one obscured by our disdain for its messengers and their motivations. This real problem is obscured because it overlaps, at times, with our opponents’ tendentious complaints. So we dismiss it."
This is good analysis, but I would like to take it a step further. Our political opponents, wrong as they may be, are still people who live in the same reality as we do. And even though our increasingly atomized world explicitly encourages arcane views of said reality, it has yet to completely divorce the observed from the real. As such, people with a warped sense of what our society will is or should be still interact with it and experience it in a manner that is at least somewhat concordant with how us on the left do. Accordingly, our political opponents will still be able to observe and identify the same fundamental problems with society, even if their subsequent expression of these problems may be warped to an almost unrecognizable degree.
What this understanding of the world means for this particular debate is that even the most hideous and revanchist stopped clock is occasionally going to report the correct time. Your average right-winger is still going to personally experience the deleterious effects of capitalism even if they've been trained to cast the blame on the day's chosen outgroup. As such, this means that pretty much any meaningful critique of capitalism/society/etc is going to at some point echo something a non-leftist says, almost as though the Rand Corporation is sponsoring a thousand monkeys with typewriters not to eventually replace Shakespeare but instead shitposters.
What this means is that any pursuit of performing ideological purity (which I ascribe to the commenters above) such that you never so much as even broach the cant of your political opponents is inherently futile. This does not mean you shouldn't try to avoid language/arguments that have been effectively captured by the right (for example, saying the more incisive "corporate media" instead of "mainstream media"), but it does mean you shouldn't be scared of invoking a right-wing demon by simply using the wrong words. As long as you are clear in your logic and firm in your moral commitments, you will be fine. And at the very least, you won't have to walk on pins and needles just to advocate for a better world.
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